Monday, May 25, 2009

Bicycle ride and shopping

We awoke this morning to a beautiful, summer-like day. It’s so pretty here at the Büdelsdorf Yacht Club. The club grounds are like a big backyard or small park, and there’s another park across the river. We can see Rendsburg in the distance at the end of the lake.

The harbormaster was around this morning, so we arranged for more Internet time for this afternoon, in case we didn’t see him again. Then we borrowed a couple of bikes and headed to Rendsburg to explore and get a bite to eat.

Since we were kind of hungry, we ate at pretty much the first place we found once we got to Rendsburg. My salad was good, but John’s hamburger was disappointing. Then when we reached the old market square, we saw a restaurant with outdoor seating and a reasonably priced menu and wished we had waited. Oh well. When we saw a German hotdog stand called Mr. Bratwurst by a fountain in a lake, we just had to try that too. The brats were pretty good, but we probably won’t do that again.

Rendsburg is a really old town that was alternately Danish and German until it finally became permanently German in the 19th century. They don’t seem to know when it was first founded, but it was first mentioned in 1199. We went into the Marienkirche (St. Mary’s Church), which was started in 1286. It’s a Lutheran church now, but it has one of those beautifully carved altars that I always associate with old Catholic cathedrals.

Interior of the Marienkirche

The town also has lots of parks and public art. We followed one bicycle path through a park until we became concerned that we could actually get lost. I was a little turned around in my directions, but I figured we were generally heading to the lake or the canal. John led us to the lake, so the way I would have gone would have taken us to the canal, I guess. It was a very pleasant bike ride.

One of many monuments in Rendsburg

On the way back to the boat, we stopped to do some provisioning. I’d spotted a Getränke (drinks) store, so we stopped to explore the German beers. John picked about eight different ones to try, and I found diet orange and diet grapefruit soda, so I grabbed that. John did a little shopping at the nearby Aldi (a German chain of value supermarkets) while I went back to the boat with our stash.

When we got up this morning, we thought that we would continue on our way today. But it’s just too pretty here and too nice a day to have to run the engine, so we’re staying for one more night. Tomorrow we’ll go a couple of hours further up the canal to an anchorage that’s supposed to be nice.